Rare earth magnets are a pervasive component of consumer, industrial, and defense related technologies. Therefore, the demand for rare earth magnets is high and continues to grow. Recycling is now even more important because the supply of available rare earth magnets has decreased and continues to be depleted. The need to efficiently recycle the rare earth material from rare earth magnets has been identified.
Current methods of recycling rare earth magnets are inefficient. This is due, in part, to the challenges at every step of the recycling phase. One such challenge is the initial step of isolating the rare earth magnet from the device from which it needs to be separated. Traditionally, devices are shredded and ground into powders that contain rare earth materials and residual materials that could include rare earth magnet coatings and pieces of the device. The powder is then processed, sometimes in environmentally harmful ways. The processing isolates the rare earth materials from the residual materials. It is a time and energy consuming process that usually does not recover 100% of the original rare earth material. And, further processing is needed to return the rare earth materials to a rare earth magnet. Therefore, there is a need to efficiently isolate rare earth material from rare earth magnets when recycling rare earth magnets.